Opposites attract

‘Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was and become part of it.’ This is the most frustrating part of being alienated and young. You hope that there’s a better life in store for you but you can’t yet bank on it.

Sally Rooney appeared two years ago with Conversations with Friends and has rightly been fêted as one of the most important writers of her generation. The question of generation matters because she’s writing about young people. Both novels feature protagonists who are undergraduates in Rooney’s own Dublin. What’s remarkable is how she’s at once fully immersed in the world she writes about (the narrative voice easily convinces as the voice of a 20-year-old) and able forensically to observe both the characters and their world, as though from a great distance.